Recap: Cloudunity Spring 2022

Last updated on February 2nd, 2023 at 2:43pm

We just wrapped up our fourth Cloudunity virtual event and what an event it was! Great speakers joined our large audience of cloud professionals to learn best practices and get deeper dives - and previews - from the Kion team.

Getting even more out of Kion

Kion team members from design, engineering, and delivery shared highlights of features we've introduced since our last Cloudunity event - and how to use these features to super-charge cloud operations. Here are just a few of the highlights:

• We've taken compliance scores a step further, allowing you to customize these scores.​
  
• Additional support for Google Cloud - we've delivered more than 90 new features!
  
• Our new account wizard helps you create or connect any number of accounts from any of our supported cloud providers using a simple standardized process.
• We now help you make the most of your reserved instances by not only showing you exactly how many of your hours you have used, but by also showing you how your reserved instances are utilized across all of your projects and accounts.
• You can now use tags and labels to filter spend reports. Combining tags and labels, your engineers can add tags around lifecycle environment, and you can enrich that data with other information.
• We also recently announced a new Kion deployment method for Google Cloud using Kubernetes clusters.

Learn more in our super-charging Kion session replay.

A peek into what's coming in Kion

We pulled back the curtain to share some upcoming enhancements to Kion - including a big new feature that's coming up in our next release!

• We'll be introducing even more support for Google Cloud, including compliance jumpstarts and webhook support.
• We'll be going beyond our Kubernetes deployment support to provide better control and visibility into applications running inside Kubernetes clusters.
• Labels - with actions! We're going beyond metadata and reporting when it comes to labels.
• Our roadmap includes options to give you more flexibility when it comes to funding models.
• Finally, coming very soon: resource inventory across your cloud environments. You'll soon be able to get full context, including savings opportunities and compliance findings, at a resource level.

Learn more in our industry trends and roadmap session replay.

Learning from other cloud professionals

At our Cloudunity event in Fall 2020, we featured the Indeed team and their journey to the cloud. At that time, Indeed was a new customer to Kion. This year, we checked back in with Hai Le from Indeed to hear what's new and learn more about their progress. A few highlights:

• Indeed's Cloud Foundation Group and its business unit supports about 500 product teams and thousands of services around the globe. Indeed helps people get jobs; the Cloud Foundation Group helps teams get to the cloud.
• The Group's goal is to help teams go from an idea to production in 10 minutes or less by providing workload accounts fast. Indeed uses Kion to enable this speed to access.
• Indeed maintains a focus on enabling their teams through organization-wide training, partnering with cloud providers to do accelerator classes for developers, and providing self-guided learning platforms to work towards certification.

Finally, a few lessons learned from Indeed:

• "Public cloud will let you shoot yourself in the foot": bake in security at every layer.
• Have a tagging strategy in place: "the benefits of tagging are just self-explanatory".
• "Public cloud loves to market infinite resources, infinite scaling... but they do run out of stuff sometimes": when you're looking at ways to scale out, work with your cloud provider to understand limitations early on.

Learn more in the replay of our chat with Indeed.

In addition, we were joined by CJ Thrasher from Leidos and Yadushri Baliyan from Verizon to talk about:

• How they reduced the time required to roll out access to new cloud environments.
• Creating a common platform across security and operations to help facilitate the work of product teams in the cloud.
• Leveraging the automation capabilities in Kion to drive secure, fast innovation in the cloud.
• How a push to be 'cloud agnostic' and challenges in deciphering your cloud bill can hamper cloud ROI.

Learn more in our expert panel replay.

Check out the complete Cloudunity Spring 2022 playlist on YouTube. And keep an eye on our website for news of our next Cloudunity event!